Best Analytics Tool

Here are some of the top 10 tools that you can use to gain more understanding about your website traffic - By Akash Dixit

1. Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is one of the best free tools that any website owner can use to track and analyze data about Web traffic. You get to see what keywords are bringing the most visitors to your pages and what aspects of your designs are turning them off. This tool will generate a report for your website that includes information about visitors, traffic sources, goals, content and e-commerce. The downside of Google Analytics is that it can take time to update. (The real-time version is still in beta testing.) There are other tools that offer real-time updates of your data now.

2. Spring Metrics.

Spring Metrics has taken the analytics tool and made it simpler. You don’t have to be a professional data-miner to get the answers to your questions. You get real-time conversion analytics, top converting sources, keyword analytics, landing-page analysis, e-mail performance reports and simple point-and-click configuration. Unlike Google Analytics, Spring Metrics tracks a visitor’s path through your website from the time he landed to the time he left. All of this is included in Spring Metrics’ Standard Plan for $49 a month. When you first sign up, you get to try it free for 14 days. The simplicity of this tool has a lot of website owners switching over from Google Analytics.

3. Woopra.

Woopra is another tool that offers real-time analytics tracking, whereas Google Analytics can take hours to update. It is a desktop application that feeds you live visitor stats, including where they live, what pages they are on now, where they’ve been on your site and their Web browser. You also have the ability to chat live with individual site visitors. This can be a great feature for your e-commerce site to interact with customers. Woopra offers a limited freebie plan as well as several paid options.

4. Clicky.

Clicky also offers a free service if you have only one website and a Pro account for a monthly fee. You get real-time analytics, including Spy View, which lets you observe what current visitors are doing on your site. Clicky's dashboard is simple to use and presents all the information you want to see clearly. They also have a mobile version that makes it easy for you to check your stats anywhere.

5. Mint.

Mint is an analytics tool that is self-hosted and costs $30 per website. You get the benefit of real-time stats, which you don’t get with the free Google Analytics. You can track site visitors, where they are coming from and what pages they are viewing. And Peppermill, a part of Mint, lets you make any adjustments to make it more compatible for your use with tons of free add-ons.

6. Chartbeat.

Chartbeat lets users get the most from their data with instant information. They keep constant watch on your visitors and what they are doing on your website. This gives you the information you need in order to make the adjustments necessary to your content or design. You get a free month when you sign up and after that plans start at $9.95 per month.

7. Kissmetrics.

Kissmetrics is another analytics tool that allows clients to track the movements of individual visitors throughout their websites. You can see how behaviors change over time, identify patterns and see the most typical and recent referrers, among other stats. It offers a “Timeline View” of visitor activity in an easy-to-understand visual format. You can try this service free for 30 days. Plans start at $149 a month, depending on how many events are tracked.

8. UserTesting.

UserTesting.com is a unique way to gather information about site users. You are paying for a group of participants of your choosing to perform a set of tasks on your site. The user and his activity will be recorded on video. In about an hour, you will have your feedback. You get to hear the actual thoughts of users in your target demographic. The cost is $39 per participant you choose. You may choose anywhere from 1 to 100 testers.

9. Crazy Egg.

Crazy Egg uses the power of Heatmap technology to give you a visual picture of what site visitors are doing on your Web pages. It shows you where people are moving their mouse on the page and where they click. There is a link between where people put the mouse and where they are moving their eyes. So, this kind of tracking helps you see what areas are catching the most attention and interaction from users. There is a free one-month trial with this service, and prices start at $9 month for 10 Heatmaps.

10. Mouseflow.

Mouseflow is somewhat of a combination of UserTesting and Crazy Egg. You can see video of users interacting with your website, including every mouse click and movement, scrolling and keystrokes. You also get to view heat maps from different time periods so that you can see the effect of changes that you make on your page. Pricing varies depending on how many sites you want to cover and how many sessions you want. For a single site and up to 100 recorded sessions, there is no cost. Over that, prices start at $13 a month.

What analytics tools have you tried out for your website? What do you like best?

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine and the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

 

Source : https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/the-10-smartest-web-analytics-tools/#:~:text=Woopra%20is%20another%20tool%20that,site%20and%20their%20Web%20browser.

Google analytics - discovery and beyond

It's been amazing interacting with students who want to pursue Digital Marketing and the Analytics thereof - using Google Analytics.

This is a hands-on subject - you are as good as you can get - only by interpreting and giving meaningful insights into what the Google Analytics Dashboard depicts.

But this level of Insights comes from understanding the Business Problem. What Drives the Business under consideration? What are the long term and short term goals?

Google Analytics allows you to set up measurable goals. To quote : 

Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an ecommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. Having properly configured goals allows Analytics to provide you with critical information, such as the number of conversions and the conversion rate for your site or app. Without this information, it's almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns.

(Source : https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012040?hl=en)

Business defines the Goals every year - often called Strategic Objectives . Strategic objectives are long-term organizational goals that help to convert a mission statement from a broad vision into more specific plans and projects.

Well-managed businesses usually start their planning process with a broad mission statement or vision. The mission is translated into a strategic plan that is then used to guide operations. Managers gain from an understanding of the difference between strategic and operational objectives because this distinction plays a major role in the conversion of an overarching vision into concrete, specific tasks. 

It becomes the task of the Google analytics team to convert Business objectives to GA Goals . They need to be able to add value and justify each Goal by linking it to an actual or symbolic Revenue gain. 

9 Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Analytics 5

Google Analytics 5 took the best features of their analytics program and made it even easier to use with new organization and visualization features. Here are nine awesome things you can do with Google Analytics 5 that will help you get the most out of your analytics information and use it to improve your website’s content, conversions, and user experience.

1. See your most important analytics data first.

If there is one (or more) pieces of data you want to see at a glance every time you login to your analytics, be sure to set it up in the Dashboards area.

You can create multiple dashboards, each of which can contain multiple widgets. To create a new dashboard, simply go under Dashboards in the menu bar of your analytics and then select New Dashboard. Then add your widgets. You can choose from widgets that show you one particular metric, a pie chart comparing metrics, a timeline of one to two metrics, or a table showing a dimension with two specific metrics. Each type of widget can also be filtered.

The best part of the dashboards is you can change the date range and see all of your widgets update with that date range’s data. This is great if you want to see an overview of your stats for traffic, goal completions, and other metrics of your choosing all in one place.

2. Find out which online campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions.

Have you been curious which of your online marketing campaigns (anything from local search to social media marketing) are the most successful in terms of bringing traffic and conversions to your website? Then it’s time to look at your advanced segments.

To create an advanced segment, click on the Advanced Segments dropdown and then the New Custom Segment. If you wanted to track traffic from local search directories, then call your custom segment Local Search Profiles and start entering the sites you have profiles on such as maps.google.com/maps/ for Google Places and yelp.com for your Yelp listing.

Once you have entered all of the domains you want to track, you can preview the segment to ensure it is pulling the right data and then save the segment. To view it, click on the Advanced Segments, check the custom segment you want to view and click apply. Now you can see all of your traffic and goal conversion data that arrives from those sources which will give you a good idea of what is working the best for your website. With the right custom segments, you can find out the ROI of your social media campaign as well as your other online marketing strategies.

3. Determine where your best visitors are located.

Have you considered using advertising via Google, Facebook, StumbleUpon, or other services? If not, it might be a daunting task to determine who you should target during your ad setups. Many of them will ask if you want to focus on a specific country or target your ad worldwide.

Thanks to Google Analytics, you don’t have fret any longer. Simply look under your Visitors menu to see the Location demographics of your visitors.

Here, you can see your worldwide stats, including the average time on site and bounce rate of visitors from particular countries. You can also drill down to particular countries and see these stats as well as your goal conversion rates in particular regions.

Now you will know the specific locations whose visitors bring you the most conversions. Targeting visitors in these locations with your ads will result in even more goal completions for your site.

4. Learn what people are searching for on your site.

Most people know how to find the keywords that bring visitors to their sites from search engines. But how would you like to go beyond that to find out what visitors are searching once they are on your site?

If your website has a search box, go ahead and perform a search to see the URL of the search results. As an example, my blog’s search results URL is http://kikolani.com/?s=blogging. Once you have this for your site, click on the settings wheel icon in the top right corner of your Analytics menu bar and find your Profile Settings. Under Site Search Settings, select the option to Do track Site Search and enter s as the query parameter (or the one that fits your site’s URL structure).

To see the results of this setup, go to the Content menu and the Site Search area. Under Usage, you can see what terms are being searched for, if visitors refined their search, continued browsing your site, or exited which will let you know if they are finding what they want. Under Pages, you can see which pages people are upon when they decide to use the search feature. When you click on each page, you can see what terms they searched for.

Site Search can help you determine if people are finding what they are looking for on your site. It can also give you ideas of which pages of your content need more specific information as well as the new content you can create on your site to further engage your visitors.

5. Visualize what people click on the most.

Curious where people are making the most clicks on your site? In-Page Analytics under the Content menu will pull up your website in the Analytics browser with information on the percentage of clicks that have happened on each internal link on your site.

You can hover over each link to see additional details and click through to more pages on your site to see more details. This can help you visually see what areas of your site are the most popular, and help you identify where people are clicking on your site. So if you have a particular link you want visitors to see, you should be sure to place it in the areas of your website that receive the most clicks.

6. Uncover your top content.

Want to know which pages keep your visitors on your website the longest, or have the lowest bounce rate? You can see this quickly by going under the Content menu and selecting Pages under Site Content.

This section can help you identify which pieces of content keep visitors on your site the longest and lead to them wanting to continue onto more pages on your site. This can help you produce more content that people will like in the future.

7. Identify your worst performing pages.

A few items down in the content menu from your top pages are your top exit pages. This will tell you how many people are arriving and exiting on a particular page.

This is somewhat common for blogs as people are coming to find a particular piece of information and then leave (hopefully) satisfied. But for other websites, it may signify that people are not finding what they are looking for on that page and then leaving. This may mean that you need to evaluate your site’s content to ensure that visitors are finding what they want and getting a call to action so they get where you want them to be before they leave, such as subscribing to a mailing list or purchasing a product.

8. Determine where people abandon the shopping cart.

Does your website have a multiple step checkout process? If so, you should setup a goal for your website using a Goal Funnel. To do so, click on the settings wheel icon and click on Goals. Create a new goal with the Goal Type of URL Destination. After you enter the basic goal details, including the final URL of the checkout process (usually a thank you for your order page), then check the Use funnel box to enter each of the URLs that correspond to the steps a visitor must take when purchasing an item.

By using this setup, you will then be able to view reports showing you when people abandon their shopping cart during their purchasing process.

If you note a particularly high amount of people who exit on the payment page, you’ll know that you need to do some work in order to make that page more shopping friendly. Or if people exit before confirming their order, you’ll know that there is something missing that is making people not want to click that final button. Fixing these issues can lead to more sales in the long run!

9. Discover if you need a mobile site.

Have you been wondering if you need a mobile version of your website? Find out by looking under the Visitors menu. There you will find a Mobile option where you can see all the way down to a specific device and the percentage of your total visits that are from a mobile device.

The key on this screen is looking at the average time on site and the bounce rate. If your average time on site is lower and the bounce rate is higher than your overall numbers, then you’ll know that you’re losing that much of your mobile traffic.

Link Of The Dashboard

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=zIM5v3a1SuG4dj9NsaSoJQ

Data Science

Data science is an ever-evolving industry. Ask any prominent data scientist or an industry expert and he or she would say that an analytics aspirant needs to stay constantly updated about the industry. Be it the programming languages involved in analytics, the industry’s functioning and recruitment process, the tools used, the advancements in its allied fields like IoT, Machine Learning and more, there’s a lot happening around analytics.

Subhojit

Yes this article is fantastic .

Google Analytics case study

We worked on the analysis of https://www.oic.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/7755/other-sample-googleanalytics-report.pdf

After all, if each one of us can get access to Google Analytics, how difficult can the Insight Generation be?

I am attaching a 10 point summary, as submitted (exhibit 1) and post Insights (exhibit 2). Do comment and share...

Exhibit 1:

Name- Sana Khan

Web Analytics assignment

Exploring Google Analytics report for website –www.olc.gld.gov.au

From this Google analytics report, we can analyze the following 10 points–

1.      There has been Direct traffic to the website which is 40.49%, traffic via search engines is 38.04% and from referring sites are 21.47%.

2.      Most page views are to the homepage which is 23.33% and then to pages information-resources at 5.14% followed by decisions, information-privacy, and information-privacy-guidelines at 3.41%, 2.74% and 2.72% respectively.

3.      We have achieved 40.49% traffic from direct website click then 32.47% from Google search, 5.18% from bing search engine and then from referral sites we have achieved the rest of the traffic.

4.      Keywords used for reaching the websites are oic gld which comprises of 5.26%, the office of the information gave 4.16% and other keywords are health rights commission and oic.

5.      Overall there has been 2958 people who visited this site out of which 7,649 are the visits, 2958 are absolute unique visitors and 3.32 is average page views

6.      4:08 min is the average time on the site

7.      43.64% is the bounce rate.

8.      Internet explorer has fetched 91.62% visits followed by Firefox, safari, chrome, and opera.

9.      Countries from which we have received the traffic is mostly from Australia then united states, united kingdom, India and new Zealand.

10.  Pages on this site were viewed a total of 25423 times.

Exhibit 2:

Name- Sana Khan

Web Analytics assignment

Exploring Google Analytics report for website –www.olc.gld.gov.au

From this Google analytics report, we can analyze the following 10 points–

1.      There has been Direct traffic to the website which is 40.49%, traffic via search engines is 38.04% and from referring sites are 21.47%. This is a good thing since the aim of this portal is to give information to different stakeholders about Queensland

2.      Most page views are to the homepage (there must be links given out in information brochures ) which is 23.33% and then to pages information-resources at 5.14% followed by decisions, information-privacy and information-privacy-guidelines at 3.41%, 2.74% and 2.72% respectively. (this is expected traffic behavior in this website)

3.      We have achieved 40.49% traffic from direct website click then 32.47% from Google search, 5.18% from bing search engine and then from referral sites we have achieved the rest of the traffic. Traffic from Bing is large – looks like the ratio of Bing users from US and high Bing usage countries (https://www.statista.com/statistics/220538/bing-search-market-share-country/)

4.      Keywords used for reaching the websites are oic gld which comprises of 5.26%, the office of the information gave 4.16% and other keywords are health rights commission and oic. Higher than average on websites (1.5 min - ~3 mins)

5.      Overall there has been 2958 people who visited this site out of which 7,649 are the visits, 2958 are absolute unique visitors and 3.32 is average page views (expected min page viewed is 2 .. given the construct of the website )

6.      4:08 min is the average time on the site.

7.      43.64% is the bounce rate. This must be from the approx. 46% of the non google and bing traffic

8.      Internet explorer has fetched 91.62% visits followed by Firefox, safari, chrome and opera. This can help optimize during website design

9.      Countries from which we have received the traffic is mostly from Australia then United States, the United Kingdom, India , and New Zealand. This information can help create a database of people and their reason interest in Queensland. Secondary objective

10.  Pages on this site were viewed a total of 25423 times. There is a relationship .. or reason for repeat visits. Would sending a newsletter be a good thing? 

Looking forward to your comments ...

You can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/subhashinitripathi/